'PSST, HAVE A GO ON THIS!' Joyent racks up gear for Amazon haters

New 'eCommerce' tech targets people that can't bear to give cash to Bezos and Co

Amazon Web Services dominates the infrastructure-as-a-service market, leaving less well-funded competitors with a choice of entering into a grim price war, or finding other markets.

Mid-size IaaS provider Joyent appears to be doing the latter with a 'Joyent eCommerce Solutions Set' which represents a strategic shift for the company, and was announced today.

The product offering wraps up some of Joyent's advanced technology like its 'Manta' storage engine, and IaaS 'Compute' services, in secondary layers to make the tech easier to use by other companies.

Some of the wrapped-up products include customer behavior analytics, image and video post-processing, web and mobile app hosting, content-delivery services, and "an expanded set of support options including business and mission critical – particularly important during the holiday retail season," the company says.

These technologies are all designed for large-scale e-retailers that want to take advantage of the flexibility of remotely provisioned compute and storage services, but don't want to fund rival Amazon.

"This is a place where Amazon has a hard time competing," explains Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's senior vice president of engineering. "These retailers do not want to deploy on Amazon as a matter of principle - Joyent is never going to sell raincoats."

The question that faces the company is whether this segment of the market is large enough to sustain a significant portion of future growth, while the company battles to maintain competitive price parity with capital-rich competitors like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

"Anyone that's in this business needs to ask themselves what am I good at, how am I going to differentiate from AWS," Cantrill says.

For this reason, Joyent is making overtures to e-retailers, proving that the old adage "my enemy's enemy is friend" still rules, even in the supposedly hyper-rational tech world of remote computing. ®